Jazz
Ward is involved in the world of jazz and has collaborated with Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. After the documentary Jazz, was aired on Public Television, in an interview in the New York Times, Ward spoke of playing West End Blues by Louis Armstrong, as a 15 year old student, so often that the bartender in the Paris cafe across the street from his student housing called him 'Satchmo:' "I must have played it a thousand times," he remembered. "I think jazz music is so important to this country. . . . . . I find these characters, Armstrong, Ellington, working in a Jim Crow world, genuinely heroic.""
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Famous quotes containing the word jazz:
“The further jazz moves away from the stark blue continuum and the collective realities of Afro-American and American life, the more it moves into academic concert-hall lifelessness, which can be replicated by any middle class showing off its music lessons.”
—Imamu Amiri Baraka (b. 1934)
“It seems to me monstrous that anyone should believe that the jazz rhythm expresses America. Jazz rhythm expresses the primitive savage.”
—Isadora Duncan (1878–1927)
“The basic difference between classical music and jazz is that in the former the music is always greater than its performance—Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, for instance, is always greater than its performance—whereas the way jazz is performed is always more important than what is being performed.”
—André Previn (b. 1929)